Love me Do

Remember when Napoleon Dynamite first came out?  Remember the ensuing tide of people quoting the movie…regardless of whether or not it fit the context?  “Your mom goes to college!”, “nun chuck skills”, and “gosh…”  Now don’t get me wrong, the movie itself is one of my favorites, but the use of the lines from it was nothing short of overkill.  In fact, I couldn’t bring myself to watch it again for about a year after it was released.

This was not because the continually used quotes ruined the movie because it was simply one-liners, and hearing them so much effectively demonstrated the lack of actual substance.  No.  What it did do was obscure the true genius of the movie: it’s insight into youth’s social structures (made all the more ironic by it’s adoption by those same systems), the superb use of silence, and Napoleon’s compulsive lying, just to name a few (maybe this is a slight overrating…).  It was, for me at least, psychological guilt by association.

I think something similar can happen, and does happen, with passages of Scripture (and maybe even the whole thing).  I was reminded of one of these instances in a conversation with a few friends about their New Testament class.  The part that was brought up was from 1 Corinthians 13:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  Love never fails.

This is one of the more famous and widely used passages of Scripture.  Weddings are a favorite place for it to be read (which is odd considering both the current divorce rate and the more-than-romantic nature of the “love” in the text).  Like Napoleon Dynamite quotes, the simple over-use of the verses has rendered mostly cliché.  This is entirely unfortunate, because it is beautiful verse.  But beauty itself doesn’t protect anything from the monotony of human experience.  If the Mona Lisa was, literally, thrown at your head four times a day I’m sure you’d get sick of seeing it too.

But, what this also means is that the problem to be overcome isn’t with the verse itself, but with perception.  So, we’ll be trying then not to say something entirely new (nothing “hidden since the foundations of the world”) but to tilt our heads and look again.

One of the more interesting things about this passage is it’s lack of personal agency; there is no one doing anything.  This may be weird considering the way the Bible is often read (I can’t count how many times I’ve heard it referred to as a guidebook…or “instruction manual”).  Despite any impulse to know explicitly, “what should I do to love?” Paul instead describes love in terms of its own actions and character.  If we want to learn the skill of love (which may explain why the contemporary world obsessed with gaining skills tends to ignore love as a power), Paul will not oblige.  Love is something more.

Let’s start with a different question.

How do you teach someone to love? The answer is so obvious here that it may be missed: you love them! Children don’t learn what love is by being set down and told or by memorizing a formula, they know love by being loved.  Love is something that happens to them.  This is what the apostle is getting by making love and not a person the agent in the passage.  In our search for a step-by-step guide we have missed the real aim of the passage: it’s communicating something about God to us!  Forest for the trees!

Paul is not alone in his thought here.  In Matthew 5, Jesus gives what are now called the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the poor in spirit…those who mourn…the meek…” Again notice the lack of anything to do.  Philippians 2 which talks in very direct terms about what it is we are to do, prefaces the section with “for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose” (Phil 2.13).

What this means is that love is not something we do.  It is something (a power) that causes, it is the grounding of our actions.  We learn love by being loved, by others and ultimately by being loved by God (if love is actually this power, would it be possible without God?).  God’s love is what allows us to love and creates the love we have.

St. Augustine expressed the idea so succinctly and beautifully as “Love, and do as you will.”  Love is not simply another action among many, or a kind of action, no.  It is something greater something beyond, a power the creates and gives birth to movement.  Wayne Cristaudo writes in his book Power, Love and Evil, “What is real is generative.  That is, the real is what creates subsequent events, subsequent actions, subsequent facts.  What is generative is thus by definition a power.”

Love is real in precisely this sense.

Tolerance, Tolerance Everywhere

Which is more tolerant, polytheism or monotheism?

This question was asked in my Crusades class last semester.  It was intended to begin a conversation about why Islam was involved in conflict in its early years.  Of course, the “correct” or at least intended answer is that polytheism is more tolerant for obvious reasons.  That answer was given by the majority of the class but acting on my newly developed “subversive impulse” I somewhat involuntarily, challenged the easy answer — arguing that polytheism was unable to accept monotheism without simply co-opting it into the pantheon: dissolving its claims of singularity and thus, monotheism itself is intolerable internally to polytheism.  Needless to say it didn’t exactly advance the conversation in a productive manner…

***Flash forward five months***

Today I was reminded of this today in a class on modern theology during a discussion of Douglas Harink’s book Paul among the Postliberals.  The conversation was on the chapter on Stanley Hauerwas.  The dialogue moved to the place of truth-claims in a pluralist society (although not set up exlicitly as).  A few in the class were unsettled by Hauerwas’s approach to education:

As a way to challenge such a view of freedom [i.e., the view that freedom is always to do what we want to do], I start my classes by telling my students that I do not teach in a manner that is meant to help them make up their own minds.  Instead, I tell them I do not believe they have minds worth making up until they have been trained by me. (77)

What was unsettling to them was not the seeming arrogance of Hauerwas in the statement, but the implications of such an education.  It was the sense of “indoctrination” implicit in the statement they had issue with.  The worry was that it would produce people who were only versed in their own tradition and not exposed to anything else.  This, they argued would lead to a kind of “I’m right, you’re wrong” mentality.

In defense of Hauerwas, Petrick and I argued that the other option was a kind of pluralistic-relativism.  The discussion itself was not resolved in the class because of time constraints.

(From here on I am addressing arguments a general culture, not of specific classmates)

What usually underlies a prohibition of truth-claims is a postmodern relativism combined with liberalism (not the Democrats).  Truth-claims, at least those that can’t be privatized, are cast as intolerant in this system.  Tolerance then, is accepting other people’s beliefs as “right” as yours.  Your beliefs are right for you, mine are right for me.

This is where the beginning discussion on polytheism comes back.  This form of relativism is in fact intolerant in precisely this sense: it refuses to accept truth-claims as truth-claims.  It contextualizes, historicizes, or phenomenologically explains these claims.  There is a certain condescension and deception to this.  This “tolerance” dissolves these “totalizing” claims back into the system of liberalism.  But of course, this mechanism makes liberalism itself as “totalizing” and “intolerant” as the systems it is rejecting, for nothing escapes its reach!

So we are left with a choice: to accept liberal “tolerance” and refuse to accept any “totalizing” truth-claim which means this tolerance, is in fact intolerance in disguise.  Or to accept competing truth-claims to our own and validate them by affirming them as wrong.  The latter option however cannot simply be an us-vs-them mentality but must engage other claims, as well as our own critically through either “consistency” (MacIntyre) or “narrative” (Milbank).

Name Tags

Ever since I read John Milbank’s ‘Postmodern Critical Augustinianism’: A Short Summa in Forty Two Responses to Unasked Questions last year I have been infatuated, or more accurately haunted, by one of the many ideas Milbank raises.  For those of you who have read Milbank this essay is typical of his style and for those of you who haven’t, reread the title of the article for a hint.  The Nottingham professor has a reputation for being…let’s say “purposefully difficult.”  Although such characterizations may be true, Milbank is still a brilliant theologian.  The passage from his essay that has become such a prevalent image in my thought appears early in the article:

One way to try to secure peace is to draw boundaries around ‘the same’, and exclude ‘the other’; to promote some practices and disallow alternatives. Most polities, and most religions, characteristically do this. But the Church has misunderstood itself when it does likewise. For the point of the supersession of the law is that nothing really positive is excluded — no difference, whatsoever — but only the negative, that which denies and takes away from Being: in other words, the violent. It is true, however, that Christians perceive a violence that might not normally be recognised, namely any stunting of a person’s capacity to love and conceive of the divine beauty; this inhibition is seen as having its soul in arbitrariness. But there is no real exclusion here; Christianity should not draw boundaries, and the Church is that paradox: a nomad city.

I used the word “haunted” above because although the image Milbank develops here is so astonishingly beautiful and at the same time remarkably avoids immediate conception.  This, it seems, is due to two things.  First, as Milbank readily admits (read: lavishes in), is that this is a paradox.  Cities are by all traditional definitions understood as locatable, geographical divisions.  A city is identifiable only insofar as there is something that is “outside” the city.  The trick here is that Milbank wants to conceive of a city where there is nothing that actually escapes its bounds.

The second reason this issue is problematic, at least for me, is that even if we abstract away from the city paradox, the same issue still arises when any form of identity is established.  It seems that the moment we say there are people who are Christians we must at the same time posit an antagonist, those who aren’t “in”.  Another British theologian, James Alison, attempts to resolve this issue, although without direct reference to Milbank, in part of his book Undergoing God.  Like Milbank, Alison wants to do away with defining Christians against something, which he argues is ultimately nihilistic because it elevates conflict as the ultimate source of identity.  He does this following Rene Girard in terms of the Other as a scapegoat and the victimization cycle that maintains stability in communities.

Although Girard’s work is insightful in itself, Alison’s invocation of him here is not without problems.  He sets God up as the Other of monotheism and Christians as those who recognize (through Christ) that they are victimizers.  This is an intriguing idea but what Alison seems to be unaware of is a kind of meta-move: his solution does not escape the cycle of violence it critiques.  Christians become those people who do not (supposedly) identify an Other (other than God) which means they are not those people who do.  The Other becomes anyone who identifies an Other — this recognition of meta-moves is indebted to Slavoj Zizek.  Whether or not this problem is intrinsic to Girard’s system is something I’ll leave to the more informed.

I do think, however, that the problem arises, at least in part, by leaving the Augustinian framework that informs Milbank’s formation of the paradox.  Because Augustine, and following him, Milbank, refuse to identify anything positive as excluded, there is no sense in which there can be an Other.  There is nothing left out because violence isn’t a thing in that sense; it is a disorientation or distortion.

While Milbank’s paradox resists the meta-move critique, it is also a much more difficult task.  Modern political identities are formed over and against an Other in very explicit terms while at the same time seemingly remain ignorant of the fact.  As Alison rightly pointed out this is nihilism at its best — both functional and unseen.  Its subtleties allowing it to mechanize conflict and its seeming success at “rallying the troops” prevent any recognition (if it’s not broken, why fix it?).  One of the most prevalent examples in the American political scene is the so called “culture war”.  Both the religious “fundamentalists” on the right and the secularist on the left sell themselves as victims of the each other.  Their identities are dependent on the Other (in both senses of the word) — or maybe more accurately, on an Other.  If one group were to dissolve, it would hardly be conceivable that the other would stay stable without finding something else to hate.

Because this is the current state of politics, and the majority of religions, we have been socialized into this mechanism.  Our tendencies, accordingly, are to play into these identity games.  Milbank’s proposal is more radically than it may seem initially.  Christianity is not simply just another identity within a greater political system (no matter how much we pretend it is), it is something more powerful, more revolutionary, more beautiful.

Of course, it is not easy to begin to conceive what this entails.  There are a number of ways to express the idea but one stuck me as I was driving home tonight.  Maybe it will aid someone.

Driving through the city, the moon — a picturesque crescent — was the only visiable light.  Although there were the “lights” of the city these lights were created because of the darkness, in a sense, to conquer the darkness.  These “artificial” lights are our self-created identities, in conflict with the darkness of the Other.  They are mere appropriations of the self-generative lights in the cosmos.  However as I continued out of the city, and the constructed lights fall with the horizon and give way to an ever growing community of stars.  These lights are not lights constructed against anything but created ex nihilo and accordingly, not against anything.  In fact it is not in spite of the void that the lights are beautiful, but with the void that they shine.

The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.  Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. [Genesis 1.2-3]

I need an economist?

Some people have dreams (in the “aspirations” sense, not the nightly explosions of the subconscious sense) of athletic achievements, others of mastering the market, still others of nylon notions of “love.”  I on the other hand, dream of the public outworking of lines of argumentation.

SGA held a “constituency dinner” tonight, proving that even amoungst the poor and overly indebted (read: college students) politics still tries to make room for lobbyists.  Although it was for and by the SGA they elected to serve food not mediated by the school’s food service (an idea I will return to later).  The dinner went as could be expected: pizza and pop topped with complaints about certain annoying policies or disagreements about certain groups’ funds.  Economics ruled most of the discussion, straying at most to give a nod towards developing the stumbling campus-wide recycling program.

I mostly nodded and looked calm.

It seemed that neither the SGA officers or the students were actually interested in anything I would identify as important (the cohesiveness of, or lack there of, the curriculum for example).  The issue that surfaced in my mind during the time I was there was food.  Not because I’m obsessed with food, or because the the pizza was particularly good, but because the food provided by the college is not generally good (I should note that I have great respect for those who work in the food service areas, this is not in any way directed at them).  There is something to be said about SGA ordering pizza for this dinner.  It is not as simple as a complaint against the food provided, but how the food is provided.

A college, especially a small liberal arts college, seems to be an ideal place to make use of local foods.  It is a substantial but not large community that has a relatively stable population.  On top of that it is in the middle of Iowa, in a town surrounded by farmland.  The nature of the discussion coupled with my insane attention to contexts prevented me from raising the issue at the time.  As I walked back to my apartment, ideas about how it was that the school could begin to make use of localized food walked my thoughts.  Of course a rationale had to be given for the switch, which meant the current system needed to be shown as broken, a task I was relatively sure I could sufficiently take on through the use of ethical arguments.  I imagined giving a lecture on how local food would be the ethical choice, a notion in reality dogged by my own self-awareness of how boring I am to most people.  Of course in the narrative, my speech inspires action and change because the argument is taken seriously as argument, again another stop-gap for the reality of this ever occurring.

As I moved from this subjective romanticism to more pragmatic ideas, a further chain was added to the follow through.  For this to actually happen, for someone to take it seriously it would have to be justified not merely on moral grounds but on economic grounds as well.  As a self-styled Marxist wannabe, this proposition was thoroughly evil.  My internal story then moved from an affective speech to a subversive intended-to-fail speech of protest–a martyrdom of potency.  But this soon gave way to the tragic reality of the situation.  Except in cases where the ethical impact of something is so large it refuses rationalization, the economic rules.

Lacking economic justification, the response would be something like, “While we see why you think the issue is important, the cost of the proposal would be too high to justify.  A college is also a business after all.”  What does it say about our society where such a statement is not only intelligible, but common?

This is an instance where I would love to be wrong, but am doubtful that I am.  Maybe one of those tragic necessities know as economists will set aside the conceptual problems associated with promoting an ethical issue not as ethical but as economic and save the day.  However, we can then ask if such a means is justified by the end…